Would a second viewing, long after the initial wave of hype had passed, change my opinion? Would I fall victim to the film’s populist, ebullient charms this second time around? No, no I would not.
It was the dark horse that came out of nowhere and charmed critics and the public alike, and such a crowd-pleasing tale of triumph over adversity that I felt like an enemy of joy for being underwhelmed by it. When I saw Slumdog Millionaire for the first time for year-end consideration back in 2008, it was riding an enormous wave of deafening buzz and good reviews that would climax with eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. I’m working with a somewhat similar criteria here: Since every movie I’m writing about has been named one of the greatest films of all time by the public (or at least their proxy, the voters of the IMDb), the question is not whether they’re any good, but rather whether they deserve to be ranked among the all-time greats (at least on a list where Shawshank Redemption, ridiculously but predictably, registers as the best of the best, above even those mob movies Francis Ford Coppola made.) You’re explicitly watching movies to see if they deserve to appear on year-end lists. You’re sometimes not watching a film to see if it’s good or not. When you watch movies with an eye toward making year-end lists, as you do in my line of business, the normal standards do not apply. (Note: To maintain a consistent list ranking, we are using the list as it appeared on September 15, 2014.) The IMDB Top 250, Nathan Rabin uses a random number generator to select one of the 250 best films of all time as chosen by the popular cinematic database, and then determines whether the individual ranking of any specific film seems high, low, or just right.
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